CompuServe Messages

This thread popped up at a perfect time for me. I have been looking for someone who has used Xbase with a CD-ROM. I couldn't find anyone who had tried it, so I had just made arrangements with Kathy Cochrane to burn a prototype for me when I found this. So it made my day to learn that someone has already been down this road. The comment about accessing multiple indexes, etc… sounds like good advice. Do you have any other suggestions? I have 489,000 records in 420 MB of data, and have been using Alpha4 to import the records (it has the best data import tools that I have found). But I'm in the process of changing to FoxPro 2.5 which is about 50% faster searching and indexing than Alpha4. Have you tried the Extract program which can be downloaded from the Census Bureau BBS? It appears to be a relatively simple public domain program which will pull records off of a CD for further crunching with a DBMS or spreadsheet. BTW, I can get more than 420 MB of .DBF files on one QIC-80 tape cartridge with compression on. Besides being much easier to work with than 1/2 inch tape, the cost of tapes and shipping will pay for the 1/4 inch drive pretty fast. Regards, John